Marco Polo is a young Venetian who describes the 55 cities he visited on his expeditions to the Emperor Kublai Khan, in the book. Each city he describes has their own adjectives according to what he saw and what he experienced. The memories he brings back were able to create, not a perfect, but a glimpse of what the cities could actually look like.
He, Marco Polo, did not just use elements of architecture to shape the image of the cities to the emperor, he used every tool which was available to him, from enacting to the most bizarre objects, due to his total ignorance to Levantine language.
“(...)one city was depicted by the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant's beak to fall into
a net; another city by a naked man running through fire unscorched; a third by a
skull, its teeth green with mould, clenching a round, white pearl.”
Even though his improvising were quite hard to understand and make out a perfect picture it was also helpful to the Emperor. The symbols Marco displayed could hardly be forgotten.
Marco, in my opinion, had the ability of understanding a city for more than what it looks from the exterior. I guess he understood a city as a combination of everything that composed her. The people, the smells, textures, signs, goods, cuisine, colours and even the surroundings. All these small details actually help us uncover the bigger picture of t all. The answer to the question: what makes a city... a city?
Marco Polo also states that a city can also be something that just exists in our minds, a dream, something that we want it to be and not what it really is.
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and
fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd,
their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
Marco is a very smart young man who found a different way to express out the world that surrounds him. He finds words very minimal and superficial and believes that a city can’t be defined, explained and visualized only by a mere speech. There’s also a need of emotion, feelings, representations of scenarios for one to understand the context which is being revealed. There’s much more to a city than just buildings, walking paths, streets, lamp posts and staircases. It is also who built them and who walks on them.
“Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased, (...)”
Marco was able to take the Emperor to the heart of each city. He could take the essential of it and do the whole job just with one gesture. Despite few discussions between both men, the results were roughly satisfying. Even when the young Venetian thought that all cities turned out to be the same in the end he realized that what he had learnt about each city allowed him to differentiate them on a smaller scale – Kublai Khan’s maps.
“At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an
incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby
meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put
together, piece by piece, the perfect city(...)”
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